“Hereupon, he said, his troubles ceased.  He gave up his speculations and casuistry, and concluded to take things as he found them and to make them better.  He became more than ever the friend and patron of his servants, rendered to them, to the best of his ability that which was just and equal, felt in buying servants and in having them born in his household, somewhat as pastors of churches, he supposed, feel in receiving new members to be trained up for usefulness, here, and for heaven.  He said that he had a hundred and seventy-five servants, and that he doubted whether there was a happier, or more virtuous, or more religious community anywhere.

“‘But,’ said the young Northern lady, who had recently come to be a teacher in the family where we visited, ’what will become of them when you die?’

“‘Why, Miss,’ said he, ’what will become of any household when the parents die?  The truth is,’ said he, ’I believe in a covenant-keeping God.  I make a practice of praying for my servants, by name.  I keep a list of them, and I read it, sometimes, when I read my Bible, and on the Sabbath, and on days set apart for religious services.  I have asked God to be the God of my servants forever.  I shall meet them at the bar of God, and I trust with a good conscience.  Many of them have become Christians.’

“‘Do you ever sell them?’ said she.

“‘I have parted with some of my servants to families,’ he replied, ’where I knew that they would fare as well as with me.  This was always with their consent, except in two or three cases of inveterate wickedness, when, instead of sending the fellows to the state-prison for life, as you would do at the North, I sold them to go to Red River, and was as willing to see them marched off, handcuffed, as you ever were to see villains in the custody of the officers.  But had any of your good people from the North met them, an article would have appeared, perhaps, in all your papers, telling of the heart-rending spectacle,—­three human beings, in a slave-coffle! going, they knew not where, into hopeless bondage!  And had they escaped and fled to Boston, the tide of philanthropy there, in many benevolent bosoms, would have received new strength in the grateful accession of these worshipful fugitives from Southern cruelty.  Whereas, all which love and kindness, and every form of indulgence, instruction, and discipline, tempered with mercy, could do, had been used with them in vain.  One was a thief, the pest of the county, and had earned long years in a penitentiary; but slavery, you see, kept him at liberty!  Another was brutally cruel to animals; another was the impersonation of laziness.  Two of them would have helped John Brown, no doubt, had he come here, and they might have gained a Bunker Hill name, at the North, in an insurrection here, as champions of liberty.’

“This led to some remarks about the great economy which there is in the Southern mode of administering discipline and correction on the spot, and at once, instead of filling jails and houses of correction with felons.  But to dwell on this would lead me too far into a new branch of our subject.